PALO ALTO, California, August 10 /PRNewswire/ --

- Proof of Concept Study Investigating NS4B-RNA Binding Inhibitor

Eiger BioPharmaceuticals, Inc., a biotechnology company developing antiviral therapies, announced today that the first patients have been dosed in an innovative clinical trial in patients chronically infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV). The trial, run in centers in Australia and New Zealand, will investigate the antiviral effect of clemizole monotherapy in the absence of interferon.

LONDON, August 11 /PRNewswire/ -- The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) has called on the Prime Minister to introduce parity between nurses and pharmacists in the prescribing of controlled drugs.

In its evidence to the Prime Minister's Commission on the Future of Nursing and Midwifery, the RPSGB points to the existing discrepancy between the ability of nurses to prescribe controlled drugs in certain conditions as independent prescribers, when pharmacist independent prescribers cannot so prescribe, even when the medicine in question is a controlled drug which they can sell as ingredients in over the counter medicines.

HONG KONG and LAKE ZURICH, Illinois, August 12 /PRNewswire/ --

Fenwal, Inc. of Lake Zurich, Illinois, and Golden Meditech (stock code: 801.HK) of Hong Kong, announced today they have agreed to form a joint venture in China to focus on blood collection and transfusion products for the fast-growing Chinese medical market.

The transaction is expected to be completed in early 2010, subject to the signing of a definitive agreement and other customary company and regulatory conditions.

CRANBURY, New Jersey, August 12 /PRNewswire/ --

- BlackLight Power Physics Grand Slam: Power, Hydrinos, Light Signature, Theory Prediction Validated

BlackLight Power, Inc. (BLP) today announces that scientists at Rowan University have for the first time independently formulated and tested fuels that on demand generated energy greater than that of combustion at power levels of kilowatts using BLP's proprietary solid-fuel chemistry capable of continuous regeneration. Operating power systems using BLP's chemistry, Rowan University professors have reported a net energy gain of up to 6.5 times the maximum energy potential of the materials in the system from known chemical reactions.

LONDON, August 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Commenting on last night's BBC Three documentary which followed the lives of three young people living with Autism and Asperger syndrome ('The Autistic Me', BBC Three, 9pm, 11th August 2009), Lesa Walton - Care Development Director of specialist Autism care provider Brookdale Care - said today:

The programme makers and especially the three young people living with Autism and Asperger syndrome featured in the documentary are to be congratulated on aiding public understanding of Autism and associated Autistic Spectrum Conditions (ASC), which affect one in every hundred people in the UK.

FOLSOM, California, August 12 /PRNewswire/ -- On Monday, August 17th at 1:30PM in Hensill Hall 113, attendees of the 90th Annual Pacific Division Meeting of the AAAS in San Francisco will get to learn about the latest efforts in science communication from some of the brightest minds in the field.

The symposium is called Good Science is Only Part of the Job: Communicating Science to the Public. (Online link: http://www.sou.edu/aaaspd/2009SANFRANCISCO/Symposia09.html#15).

Treelines are not responding to global warming the way previous projections said they should, according to the first global quantitative assessment of the relationship between warming and treeline advance published in Ecology Letters.

The study tests the consensus that treelines have been globally advancing in response to the warming climate since 1900.

Even in adults born with extremely impaired sight, the brain can rewire itself to recognize sections of the retina that have been restored by gene therapy.  This surprising adaptability comes a year after three blind volunteers received doses of corrective genes to selected areas of their retinas at Shands at the University of Florida medical center. 

More than a year later,  tiny portions of the patients' retinas that have received gene therapy have kept their restored function, as much as 1,000-fold increases for day vision and 63,000-fold for night vision.

Labels on prescription drugs tell you what researchers know about the medication, but what is left out can be important as well and researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine think it's high time that the labeling tell you what isn't known.

Randall Stafford, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, and colleagues write in an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should require drug manufacturers to state how new medications compare with similar, existing treatments.

An insulator can now be transformed to conduct electricity by an ordinary camera flash, says a Northwestern University professor and his students who have found a new way of turning graphite oxide, a low-cost insulator made by oxidizing graphite powder, into graphene, a hotly studied material that conducts electricity. Graphene is the material du jour in studies to produce low-cost carbon-based transparent and flexible electronics.

Previous processes to reduce graphite oxide relied on toxic chemicals or high-temperature treatment.  Instead of that, the Northwestern folks kept it simple, wondering if something like a camera flash could instantly heat up the graphite oxide and turn it into graphene.